From Tracking to Robust Maneuver Regulation: an Easy-to-Design Approach for VTOL Aerial Robots
This work addresses robustness issues in control for VTOL micro aerial vehicles, offering an incremental improvement by converting existing tracking schemes into more robust maneuver regulation.
The paper tackles the problem of improving robustness for VTOL aerial robots by proposing a maneuver regulation scheme that avoids chasing virtual targets, instead requiring the vehicle to stay on a desired path with a given velocity profile. The result is a controller that inherits robustness from tracking, gains maneuver regulation features without additional tuning, and experiments on a nano-quadrotor show it remains stable under external disturbances where standard tracking fails.
In this paper we present a maneuver regulation scheme for Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Differently from standard trajectory tracking, maneuver regulation has an intrinsic robustness due to the fact that the vehicle is not required to chase a virtual target, but just to stay on a (properly designed) desired path with a given velocity profile. In this paper we show how a robust maneuver regulation controller can be easily designed by converting an existing tracking scheme. The resulting maneuvering controller has three main appealing features, namely it: (i) inherits the robustness properties of the tracking controller, (ii) gains the appealing features of maneuver regulation, and (iii) does not need any additional tuning with respect to the tracking controller. We prove the correctness of the proposed scheme and show its effectiveness in experiments on a nano-quadrotor. In particular, we show on a nontrivial maneuver how external disturbances acting on the quadrotor cause instabilities in the standard tracking, while marginally affect the maneuver regulation scheme.